Objective Islam

by D.M. Murdock/Acharya S

“Mohammedan scriptures, often erroneously thought to have been written by Mohammed. Moslems don’t believe this. But many don’t know the Koran was an enlarged revised version of the ancient Word of the Goddess Kore, revered by Mohammed‘s tribe, the Koreshites (Children of Kore), who guarded her shrine at Mecca.

“The original writing was done long before Mohammed‘s time by holy imams, a word related to Semitic ima, ‘mother.’ Like the original mahatmas or ‘great mothers’ of India, the original imams were probably priestesses of the old Arabian matriarchate. It was said they took the scripture from a prototype that existed in heaven from the beginning of eternity, ‘Mother of the Book’—i.e., the Goddess herself, wearing the Book of Fate on her breast as Mother Tiamat wore the Tablets of Destiny. Sometimes the celestial Koran was called the Preserved Tablet. There was some resemblance between this and other legendary books of divine origin, such as the Ur-text, the Book of Thoth, and the Emerald Tablet of Hermes.

“As in the case of the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Koran was much rewritten to support new patriarchal laws and to obliterate the figures of the Goddess and her priestesses.”

In The Great Religious Leaders, Charles Frances Potter says of Mohammed, “It is very doubtful that he read any of the Bible: indeed, it has not been proved that he ever read anything, or wrote anything. He called himself ‘the illiterate prophet.'” Of course, much of the Koran is based on the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, combined with pre-Islamic Arab and other traditions.

“My idea is that the Koran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad. Many of them may even be a hundred years older than Islam itself. Even within Islamic traditions there is a huge body of contradictory information, including a significant Christian substrate….”

Adding significantly to this important scholarship was the discovery in 1972 at Sana’a, Yemen, of thousands of parchment fragments from the Koran, consisting of possibly the oldest extant quranic manuscript ever found, dating to the 7th-8th centuries. Regarding these fragments, the professor who photographed them, Dr. Puin, remarks:

“So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Koran is just God’s unaltered word. They like to quote the textual work that shows the Bible has a history and did not fall straight out of the sky, but until now the Koran has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Koran has a history too. The Sana’a fragments will help us do that.”

“…some of these fragments revealed small but intriguing aberrations from the stand Koranic text. Such aberrations, though not surprising to textual historians, are troublingly at odds with the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God…. What the Yemeni Korans seems to suggest, Puin began to feel, was an evolving text rather than simply the Word of God as revealed in its entirety to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century A.D.”

Others weighing in on the value of the Yemeni discovery have included Dr. Andrew Rippin, a professor of Islamic Studies:

“The impact of the Yemeni manuscripts is still to be felt. Their variant readings and verse orders are all very significant. Everybody agrees on that. These manuscripts say that the early history of the Koranic texts is much more of an open question than many have suspected: the text was less stable, and therefore had less authority, than has always been claimed.”

In this same regard, Islamic history professor Dr. R. Stephen Humphreys summarizes the importance of the study of how the Koran was created and the Yemeni hoard in this quest:

“To historicize the Koran would in effect delegitimize the whole historical experience of the Muslim community. The Koran is the charter for the community, the document that called it into existence. And ideally though obviously not always in reality Islamic history has been the effort to pursue and work out the commandments of the Koran in human life. If the Koran is a historical document, then the whole Islamic struggle of fourteen centuries is effectively meaningless.”

The evidence reveals that the Koran was created over a period of decades, if not centuries, by a number of hands, rather than representing a single, divine “revelation” from the Almighty to Mohammed.

Like that of Buddha, Jesus, Moses, et al., Mohammed’s historicity is questionable. He seems to be yet another religious figurehead invented to create a “state” religion. His “history” is full of fantastic legends, but even if we were to find a “historical person” there, it would not be one of very high or affable character. As Potter says:

“Of women, his taste ran to widows with a temper… For recreation he delighted in cobbling shoes. Perhaps his greatest joy was when he beheld the severed heads of his enemies.

“His dislikes were just as varied. He detested silk-lined clothes, interest charges, dogs, others’ lies, Jews and Christians. He hated poets, and said, ‘Every painter will be in hell.’

“He was inordinately vain. A clever woman poet satirized him. She was slain when asleep with her child at her breast, and the vengeful Muhammad praised her murderer. Once he tortured a Jew to find the location of hidden treasure and then had him killed and added the widow to his harem. Strange indeed was the character of the prophet. How could such a person inspire such reverence and devotion? It is one of the puzzles of history.

“It was not that he developed a great theology, either, for what little theology Islam has, worthy of the name, was built up after Muhammad had long been dead.”

As to how such a character could inspire such reverence and devotion, we would submit that it was because Mohammed and Islam were created by yet another faction of “the brotherhood” for purposes of competition with Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and other religions. As N.A Morozov says:

Behind the creation of such ideologies are usually those who benefit the most, particularly “third-party” weapons manufacturers, since these divisive creeds are forever setting one culture against another.

‘Let My People Go!’

English: A green version of http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Allah-eser2.jpg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Despite the unconvincing attempts by well-meaning individuals to assert the pacificism of Islam, the fact is that it is a desert warrior’s religion and was not spread by peaceful means. As Gerald Berry says, in Religions of the World (62):

“Partly because he needed funds and partly because his followers were not skilled in agriculture as were the natives of Yathrib, [Mohammed] organized fighting bands to raid caravans. Having no ties with the older religions, he sent them out even in the peace months. This started Arabia’s Holy War. Mohammed‘s whole movement took on the character of religious militarism. He made the Moslem fanatic fighters by teaching that admission to Paradise was assured for all those who died fighting in the cause of Allah.”

In the end, Islam, which means “submission,” is built upon older myths and traditions and was designed to usurp the power of Christians, Jews and women. While we have no quarrel with all Arabian culture, we do have a big problem with ideologies that are filled with half-truths and lies. Because of arrogance and bigotry, ancient cultures, along with their variety, justice and beauty, have become nearly obliterated. In effect, the Western monolithic religions represent a massive degradation of culture.

If this planet’s inhabitants would simply become educated to the origins of their traditions in full, we could live in a world of tremendous beauty and knowledge, as opposed to ugly, superstitious and repressive ideologies that are exclusionary and bigoted. Islam arose because of the repression of Christianity and Judaism, as well as an unbalanced female-oriented culture. Like those traditions, Islam is utterly out of balance, and we may all suffer for it, particularly if the predictions come true that Islam will be the most dominant religion in the world in the next decades.

As previously stated, there are few non-Muslim women or men who would wish to live in such a world. Because of this aversion, we would expect to see in the future innumerable ghastly battles and wars waged in the name of one god or another, as has happened far too often in the past, especially with these monotheistic Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All told, these three are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, so why are they deemed “Great religions?” The “greatest” thing about them is their death toll.

If this world is to survive into the coming age, we will need as many people as possible to drop all of these divisive doctrines. What we need on this planet, right now, are honest, caring and whole human beings who are motivated not by potential favors and rewards from sadistic and ethnocentric deities in the sky but by innate decency and integrity. Only in this way can we all live in peace rather than fear, which is the weapon wielded by religion to convert the “faithful.”